Lectio
“Finally, I want to be a daughter of the Church as our holy Mother St. Teresa was and to pray for the Holy Father’s intentions which I know embrace the whole universe. This is the general purpose of my life…”
— St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Story of a Soul
Meditatio
No one, not a single one of God’s creatures, nor even His creation, is excluded from God’s love. For love is not merely a decision for God like it is for us, but it is the very nature of His being. God does not love in the sense that it is something He does or gives, but rather God is love. He is love itself, always and forever, without beginning or end, never withheld or withdrawn.
To know God’s will for our lives, then, is neither complicated nor confusing. His will for us is that we love. But not merely as an act of will or a change of heart, but that we become love itself by being grafted onto Love Himself. God’s will is that, through Christ, we become one with God — that we become, by grace, not just children of God, but one with God in Christ.
This, then, is the meaning of our lives, regardless of whether or not we will admit it or accept it. Through the sacrifice and surrender of Christ lived out in our day to day existence, we let go of all that is not love until, like Christ, the Father and we become one. But we can refuse this. We can reject our life’s meaning and choose our own instead, or accept someone else’s. And if we do, we will find only grief for what could have been in Christ. Yet even in grief there is hope because a grieving heart knows what it has lost. And so let us pray for all who grieve and for our own grieving hearts, that we may all come to embrace the One who embraces us.
Oratio
Toward The Horizon
You are my meaning
my reason
my why
my pull toward the horizon
that is You
You are my shepherd
my savior
my grace
my pull toward the horizon
that is You
You are my Father
my brother
my friend
my pull toward the horizon
that is You
Contemplatio
You were not made to earn love but to be grafted onto it — already held, already claimed, whether or not you have found the words for it yet. Whatever refusal or distance lives in you this day, it has not undone what He has already made true. Let this be the moment you stop resisting communion and let His life run into yours. Rest here a while longer, offering no resistance to His presence, and let Him do with you what only He can do.
Related Scripture
“I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.”
— John 15:5 (NRSVCE)
For Further Reading
If you enjoyed this post, you may also like True Solitude is a Home: Merton and the Difference Between Isolation and Communion (Lectio Divina), which meets today’s meditation on being grafted into Love from another angle — where this post finds union in the choice to stop resisting communion, that one finds it in solitude discovered as home rather than escaped.
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity.
Wrestling With God.
Returning To Love.
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